After finding normal art schools too rigid, Sima Weiming and Xiao Mo, both painters, became convinced that they could provide a place in Dalian where students could experiment with any kind of art they wanted to. In 1998, they started MyArt Painting Creation Limited. Since 2004, the school’s been located on the eighteenth floor of the Sunshine Digital Tower, 596 Huangpu Road, in Dalian’s High-Tech Industrial Zone, housing three studios, each with two floors.
Sima, the general manager, opens the door to the first studio and its welcoming smell of paint. Here the students’ work lines the walls and stands in front of us on easels. Many small canvases lie drying on the floor, obviously just painted not many days before our arrival. On one table is the evidence of hard work: dried paint in the colors found in the art around us. But paint and canvases aren’t the only materials available. Some of the art in this room looks interactive. It’s made out of circuit boards and other parts of computers. Great globs of paint make one look at vertical and horizontal surfaces from their edges, from the sides rather than the front. Bumps and scratches in paint show many layers of composition. The cords of computer mice are tangled together and hang near Sima’s desk, behind which is displayed an award from an American art show, “The Colors of China: Painting, Calligraphy & Children’s Art, 2009.” It’s difficult to tell where the art materials end and where daily objects begin.
Sima shows us the Future Artists Series, catalogues the school puts out, each issue of which showcases the work of one student. The students on many of the covers are young children. Their biographical sketches list their birthdays in the 1990s. Some of them have already had shows and sold their work in the West. Sima smiles and points out their early achievements. A flip through these catalogues is enough to get you excited about the students’ work and interested in mixed media: even on the flat page, the materiality of the work in the pictures makes you wonder what’s underneath. What are these students capable of? What materials are going to be important to them?
Before we climb the stairs to see more of the first studio, in walks York—a twenty-year-old artist who spends much of his time at MyArt. He’s quiet and looks simultaneously excited and confident. York, aka Jin Ge, began painting when he was a young boy. According to his curriculum vitae, he established his own studio when he was eleven years old. His oeuvre encompasses several media, styles, and moods. A great many of his paintings, like Venice I and Venice II, contain a powerfully present black against an almost-misty green, which evokes a distance and calm that seems about to be populated or just evacuated. Other paintings, like Tokyo Night, suggest movement with their bright reds, yellows, and whites. He’s begun experimenting with photography and sometimes paints from the photos he’s taken. When I ask him about his influences, he pulls out a copy of La guerre, a novel by J. M. G. Le Clézio, a Nobel Prize–winning French writer known for his focus on the environment. Stacked high on the floor of the first upstairs area are dozens of canvases, their content each a single color, oil paint mixed with water. To make these, York poured the mix onto the canvases and then tilted them, allowing the mix to go where it would. The results resemble clouds. York says he likes the idea of not being able to control the paint, only the tilt. A great deal of white space occupies each canvas, giving an unfinished feel to them.
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